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Ask HN: Is there a spiritual successor to del.icio.us?

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Re: Ask HN: Is there a spiritual successor to del.icio.us?

#101
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I’d much prefer just being able to use the site on mobile When's the last time you tried that? Sometime in the past year ish (can't remember exact dates), it got updated to scale properly on narrow screens, and I've had no problem using it on mobile since then.

Using it on an iPhone 12 Mini-Firefox and the “Add Bookmark” screen is a tiny form in an ocean of white emptiness. https://ibb.co/jZgzQnF

On iPhone I use an app[1] for a nicer experience.

[1] https://apps.apple.com/ca/app/pins-for-pinboard/id1547106997

Re: Ask HN: Is there a spiritual successor to del.icio.us?

#102
This is just sort of how the internet is going right now. Global, free services like that are starting to make less money. Facebook is circling the drain, Twitter is in hot water. Going decentralized is sort of getting more popular. Companies are focused more on profitability than growth right now, so there's little incentive to grow these platforms and more incentive to ruin them in the hopes of making money.

I find myself using markdown files these days to store my links. That way I can also store context around the links by writing stuff around the links. This sounds foolish, but it does in fact check all your boxes:

- You can publish this markdown file on GitHub pages so it has integration with browsers

- People can follow you using RSS (yes, people still do this, myself included)

- I use Epsilon Notes and FolderSync Pro on my Android device to sync the markdown files over Dropbox so there's mobile app support

- Portable across time because it's just text

- Widely supported by different tools

This is actually also my note-taking system. I have shortcuts in them that allow me to take screenshots and store them next to the markdown and link to them. I store links by simply making a link in the markdown file of the paragraph I'm working on.

Re: Ask HN: Is there a spiritual successor to del.icio.us?

#103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maciej announced on twitter that he would be taking the year 2022 off [1]. I have not had any issues with pinboard but I also only use it occasionally. [1]: https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/1476079701978345472

Twitter really did a number on this guy over the past few years. Glad he’s taking some time away from it.

I wouldn't minimize his work as "twitter" — he spent a lot of time, money, and effort on raising money (millions) for various downballot candidates over multiple elections only to ultimately find that it didn't have much impact. That's a bit crushing, and the kind of thing that takes some time to digest. I was a bit flummoxed myself and I had much less skin in the game.

Re: Ask HN: Is there a spiritual successor to del.icio.us?

#106

This is just sort of how the internet is going right now. Global, free services like that are starting to make less money. Facebook is circling the drain, Twitter is in hot water. Going decentralized is sort of getting more popular. Companies are focused more on profitability than growth right now, so there's little incentive to grow these platforms and more incentive to ruin them in the hopes of making money. I find…

> free services like that are starting to make less money

GDPR's fault?

Re: Ask HN: Is there a spiritual successor to del.icio.us?

#107
I built my own https://www.kontxt.io and hit the front page of HN not too long ago. It's a modern hybrid productivity and social bookmarking / news / knowledge aggregation service. Think social web layer with CMS and social network. You can save the site / pdf (link or archive), engage with highlights, comments, and polls. There's privacy controls. It's searchable. Everything can be organized with tags as well as folders. You can join groups and follow people to discover shared content. Highlights can be shared natively to popular social platforms and observed with analytics. User's can also set a personal promotion with what they share as an added benefit and incentive to provide value.

Re: Ask HN: Is there a spiritual successor to del.icio.us?

#108
I've been using Pocket for quite some time. Exported from Pinboard IIRC. Dead simple with browser extension and app integration on mobile. If you have the app installed on your phone, you can use the "share" icon on any other app to send a link to Pocket. https://getpocket.com/my-list

Re: Ask HN: Is there a spiritual successor to del.icio.us?

#110
post #78

From my experience, simplicity and portability is really the key to a long term and effective bookmarking system. I add everything into one single bookmark folder in Firefox and slap on a few tags. Syncing between devices works perfectly. Adding a star (*) to the address bar limits the search to bookmarks only, which makes it insanely fast to look up interesting stuff I have bookmarked but vaguely remember, by typing…

I agree that the browser's built-in bookmarks manager is underrated. I never really got the social bookmarking phenomenon.

For your use case, however, I recommend also getting into Hypothesis. I always used browser-based bookmarks (and still do), but I've gotten a ton of utility out of Hypothesis since I began using it. It's weird, because I came at it slowly, having known about Hypothesis for a long time—my initial impression being, "yeah, okay, kind of neat or whatever", followed by not touching it for years.

The problem with browser-based bookmarks is that you're limited to the title* and URL for recall, plus your own tags. With Hypothesis, however, you can quote from the page in question, marking up specific passages, and then also add your own comments about it (plus tags). This is in fact really the only way that I use Hypothesis—when I feel like scribbling something in the margins. This, however, in a way ends up emerging as a replacement for much of my bookmarks-for-recall use, too, even though it's never really the point. Because the storage model includes the contents of the quoted passage and the text of your own annotation, this additionally grants you, in a limited way, the ability to do partial text search across the contents of the collected pages. As a result, I end up using Hypothesis far more often to relocate something than I do with the bookmarks manager nowadays.

It would be great if this functionality became standard for all browsers (and it might still; folks on the Chrome team have suggested they're serious about adding annotations to the browser in some form). With Mozilla deciding that selling premium plans to a commercial, closed-source SaaS is in their financial interest, however, it seems virtually guaranteed that Firefox's built-in bookmarks will remain deliberately limited for the lifetime of Firefox as a product, in order to funnel people towards Pocket, unless/until Chrome does something to make them feel pressured to change.

* NB: you can technically override the name, I guess, but I've never done that and always let it default to the title. Firefox used to have an additional description/comment field, but this got removed from the UI. I suspect it was rarely used. I can't say I did anything with it more than a handful of times. Hypothesis's UI for actually resolving (i.e. highlighting) the fuzzy anchors really does alter my behavior a lot towards this direction.

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